The Secret Code of Plastic Recycling

Did you ever notice that most plastic items are marked somewhere with the number 1-7 inside a recycling arrow symbol?

This mark is part of a system that identifies various types of plastics. It indicates how and where you can recycle different plastic items from your home and office. Unfortunately, the presence of one of these symbols doesn't mean that these materials may be recycled everywhere. You must check with your local municipal waste service. The first two types — PET and HDPE — are the most common forms of plastic, so they are the easiest to recycle. Others, like PVC, contain more nasty chemicals but should be recycled to keep toxins out of the environment.

Here’s a guide to the plastic recycling code, plus some common products you’ll find of each plastic type:

#1 PET (Polyethylene terephthalate): soda bottles, oven-ready meal trays and water bottles. PET plastic is the most common for single-use bottled beverages, because it is inexpensive, lightweight and easy to recycle. It poses low risk of leaching breakdown products. Recycling rates remain relatively low (around 20%), though the material is in high demand by remanufacturers.

#2 HDPE (High-density polyethylene): milk bottles, cereal box liners and grocery/trash/retail bags. HDPE is a versatile plastic with many uses, especially for packaging. It carries low risk of leaching and is readily recyclable into many goods.

#3 PVC (Polyvinyl chloride): plastic food wrap, loose-leaf binders and plastic pipes.PVC is tough and weathers well, so it is commonly used for piping, siding and similar applications. PVC contains chlorine, so its manufacture can release highly dangerous dioxins. If you must cook with PVC, don't let the plastic touch food. Also never burn PVC, because it releases toxins.

#4 LDPE (Low-density polyethylene): dry cleaning bags, produce bags and squeezable bottles. LDPE is a flexible plastic with many applications. Historically it has not been accepted through most American curbside recycling programs, but more and more communities are starting to accept it.

#5 PP (Polypropylene): medicine bottles, aerosol caps and drinking straws. Polypropylene has a high melting point, and so is often chosen for containers that must accept hot liquid. It is gradually becoming more accepted by recyclers.

#6 PS (Polystyrene): NASTY material used for compact disc jackets, plastic tableware, and worst of all... those horrible packaging styrofoam peanuts! Polystyrene can be made into rigid or foam products — in the latter case it is popularly known as the trademark Styrofoam. Evidence suggests polystyrene can leach potential toxins into foods. The material was long on environmentalists' hit lists for dispersing widely across the landscape, and for being notoriously difficult to recycle. Most places still don't accept it, though it is gradually gaining traction.

#7: A wide variety of plastic resins that don't fit into the previous categories are lumped into number 7. Other: three- and five-gallon reusable water bottles, certain kinds of food containers and Tupperware. A few are even made from plants (polyactide) and are compostable. Polycarbonate is number 7, and is the hard plastic that has parents worried these days, after studies have shown it can leach potential hormone disruptors.

If you must use plastic products for your marketing and promotional campaigns, please consider using the recycled and recyclable kind. From wearables, to journal covers, to pens and bags, there are many cool, practical promotional products made of recycled plastic. We can help you find them.

Google Store Goes Green

Google is not just the most popular web service on the planet. The company also has a strong environmental and social ethic which now extends to its corporate merchandising program.

While many brands continue to put their logos on toxic merchandise that eventually ends up languishing in landfills, Google's merch store has gone green. You can shop there for everything from stylish flash drives made of recycled plastic to a hemp travel organizer to the organic cotton Blogger beanie pictured above. To make your geek paraphernalia shopping even more guilt-free, Google currently offers free shipping throughout most of the U.S.!

Google's visionary business strategies and success is well documented, and the company has been recognized multiple times by Fortune Magazine as America's #1 place to work. The Google Store is a wonderful example of aligning your corporate values with your corporate merchandising program and using quality sustainable merchandise to build positive brand equity. We can help you get there. Contact us through eco imprints if you'd like to create your own custom-branded line of sustainable swag.

U.S. Mayors Shut The Tap on Bottled Water

Meeting in Miami this week, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, banned bottled water for city workers. Citing environmental concerns and the excellent quality of municipal water, the cities will no longer use municipal funds to purchase water bottles.

Our own Mayor Gavin Newsom, who phased out the purchase of bottled water in San Francisco last June, proposed the resolution along with 17 other big-city mayors. "Cities are sending the wrong message about the quality of public water when we spend taxpayer dollars on water in disposable containers from a private corporation," he said.

Last year Americans spent an estimated $15 billion on bottled water and this pact only impacts municipal purchases, but a trend is developing. Sixty American mayors have already canceled their hydration contracts, and some places in Canada have also banned the bottle. Rejecting plastic water bottles is more environmentally and financially sustainable. Millions of bottles a day do not get recycled, and the plastic takes at least 1,000 years to biodegrade.

Not surprisingly, the American Beverage Association is not pleased with this development. In a statement, the association stated that private water companies have come to the rescue during emergencies that compromise public water systems. The statement also notes that plastic bottles are 100 percent recyclable (but didn't mention lower-than-desired recycling rates and the additional energy required to recycle).

While some see banning plastic bags and water bottles as a hassle, our oceans and landfills are choked with plastic and need a break. We applaud this bold move and the attention it focuses on unnecessary disposable products. The good news is there are some great alternatives to the plastic water bottle.

Shop Locally and Buy Organic

We love working in San Francisco, but we're blessed to live on a small farm in rural West Marin county, surrounded by open space, organic greens, and highly creative people who have pioneered sustainable living and agriculture. Chez Panisse, the original "California Cuisine" restaurant in Berkeley, gets many of its seasonal organic vegetables within a tomatoes throw of our house.

This wonderful natural setting has nothing to do with promotional marketing, but it has everything to do with the way we approach our business and advise our clients.

We designed a logo and label for our neighbor's 10-acre organic family farm operation, Gospel Flat Farms. The design was inspired by an image we've seen repeatedly over the years — patriarch farmer Don Murch driving his tractor through bucolic fields of green. Gospel Flat Farms used to sell most of its organic vegetables and flowers to urban restaurants and farmer's markets. But last year they built a wonderful old-timey farm stand so neighbors can buy direct. It's a great resource for our community and much of the food they produce now stays very local.

Click HERE to see video of celebrity chef, Tyler Florence, on a tour of Gospel Flat Farms led by Don's amazingly talented son, Mickey.

Organic food tastes better and is nicer to the earth. We have our own organic garden, and raise chickens for eggs. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a farmstand across the street, but we can all choose to purchase food items grown or produced within 100 miles us. It's not only fresher and better tasting, but it helps reduce the amount of energy and materials needed for transport and packaging.

You can support small-scale agriculture like that of Gospel Flat Farms by shopping at your friendly neighborhood farmers’ market. Or, escape urban life, take a trip out to the country and buy direct from the farm stand.

The Promise and Problems of Corn Plastic

Those of you who follow us know that we’ve been on an anti-petroleum-based-plastic crusade of sorts.

Because we’re trying to change an industry notorious for pimping tons of plastic swag that ends up languishing in landfills, we tend encourage the use of biodegradable alternatives to petroleum-based plastic materials whenever possible. We also advocate eliminating plastic use altogether when it’s not really needed.

We‘ve sourced a fairly wide selection of promotional product alternatives made in the USA from a promising biodegradable polymer called PLA, better known as corn plastic. PLA can also be made from other renewable plants, including soy, peanuts, and potatoes.

PLA is an alternative to plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the petroleum-based material used in many consumer goods and product packages.

You may have seen PLA packaging recently at Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Target and Wild Oats Stores. The material was used to package the DVD of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. And from pens and heavy-duty coffee mugs (see photo above) to trade show badges, you can now put your logo on many practical corn plastic goods that might otherwise be made of conventional plastic.

Innovation is seldom without controversy. And there is a serious controversy in sustainability circles about whether or not corn-based plastic is really better for the environment. We recently attended an Eco Tuesday function in San Francisco, where several of us lingered after the event to carry on a spirited discussion about the pros and cons of corn-based plastics.

What follows are some points made on both sides of that discussion, and also our nuanced take on the issue:

BENEFITS:

• PLA biodegrades into harmless natural compounds in the right conditions. It is made in the USA from a renewable resource and can be composted into fertilizer. (On the flip side: conventional plastic is made from oil, contains toxins, and takes between 100 to 1000 years to break down.)

• PLA is recyclable as well as biodegradable – if you have the right facilities to do those things.

• PLA is part of a broader solution to keep petrol-plastic out of our environment and could take pressure off our bulging landfills and our environment (plastics already take up 25 percent of dumps by volume, and scientists recently reported a toxic vortex of plastic debris twice the size of Texas swirling around the Pacific Ocean).

• Producing PLA uses 65 percent less energy than producing regular plastics, according to independent analysis (funded by its maker). It also generates 68 percent fewer greenhouse gases, and contains no toxins.

• PLA is an affordable alternative to conventional plastic, so it’s reasonable for industry to adopt it.

NEGATIVES:

• Yes, it’s fully biodegradable within a few months, but you can’t just throw it in your backyard’s compost pile. To decompose, PLA requires a temperature of close to 200 degrees and a special type of composting facility.

• There are currently few facilities nationwide that accept PLA, and most municipalities don’t now have the capacity to sort it or accept it for compost or recycling. As such, under current systems, most PLA could end up in landfills, where it may not break down any faster or more thoroughly than other forms of plastic

• Corn is proving to be a less-than-ideal solution for fuels (Google: "corn ethanol problems") and some question its use for products and packaging at a time of growing global food shortages.

• Corn production is relatively energy and water intensive, uses pesticides and fertilizers to grow, and some genetically modified corn has reportedly been used in PLA. Corn production is also heavily subsidized by the U.S. government.

• Corn plastic products aren’t stable at high temperature, so it isn’t a good plastic alternative in all applications. PLA tends to melt at temperatures above 115 degrees. So your lightweight compostable corn plastic soda cup could morph into a pancake if you leave it in your car on a hot day.

OUR OPINION:

We acknowledge that there are many legitimate concerns with corn plastic, but we believe it should be further adopted and improved.

Our hope is that the use of alternatives to petroleum-based goods will encourage further innovation and perhaps even a revolution in composting. PLA is a relatively new technology in terms of mainstream usage and it has a great deal of promise if more people got behind it.

It’s wise to be wary of PLA’s limitations, but we should not dismiss it outright because the technology or systems to sort and compost it have not yet been perfected.

When I was a kid, very few people recycled, but today nearly every municipality has convenient recycling systems in place. While we’ve made real progress on that front, petrol-plastic usage and disposal is still not perfect. Some plastics can’t be easily recycled today, even here in San Francisco.

Corn plastic is not the “green bullet” some hype it to be. The technology needs improvement and it will take time to expand composting alternatives and create a convenient collection system that includes biodegradable plastics. What we really need to mainstream biodegradable plastic and other alternatives is a collective push for change. And change is what our environment needs right now.

Non-Toxic Promo Flash Drives with 100% Recycled Casing

We've recently added a number of stylish new usb drives to our growing mix of practical and eco friendlier promotional gadgets. This ergonomic shaped design is made of a 100% recycled ABS plastic exterior casing. Manufactured under stringent RoHS standards to keep toxics out of the environment. It's both PC and Mac compatible, and comes in recycled cardboard box. We can load it up for internet streaming or incorporate your branding, advertisement, brochure or website on screen every time the flash drive is used. Get more info here.

Seeded Paper Cup Holders

Far too many disposable beverage cups end up in the trash bin. We've banned disposable cups in our office and we're huge proponents of reusable beverage containers. But the fact is coffee mugs, glassware and heavy duty beverage tumblers are not always a viable alternative for food service organizations. 

If you run a socially responsible restaurant, a fair trade organic coffee shop, or if you're just organizing a green event where caffeine-laced beverages on-the-go are a requirement, we've got a sweet new sustainable solution for you: Seeded Paper Cup Holders. Not only are these biodegradable and made of recycled materials, they're full of seeds that actually grow. As a bonus, they look and feel earthy and come in a range of beautiful colors. Not a bad spend if you need to grow your brand. Find out more here.